Slashdot Mirror
Sprint Close to Buying Nextel
NateDawg writes "After the recent merger of AT&T and Cingular, it looks like Sprint is close to buying out Nextel. According to CNet, the different networks could bring expensive problems, but that could be overcome by the diversity of the company's clients. Nextel has many corporate clients, while Sprint appeals to families and teens."
Things always tend to change after a company is bought; i hope they stay doing good.
We'll see how this goes.
...)
If you think Cingular/ATT is a bloodbath, wait till you see this one.
Divergent technologies, different networks, and completely different corporate philosophies.
Nextel caters to the business user (not typically the white-collar CEO types, but more of the blue-collar type) and it's great for that.
Sprint basically picks up the leftovers that VZW & Cingular don't want (those with iffy credit ratings
Yeah, good luck. Match made in heaven, really.
According to CNet, the different networks could bring expensive problems, but that could be overcome by the diversity of the company's clients.
This sentence should read: "According to CNet, the different networks could bring expensive problems, but that could be overcome by making the customers pay through the nose"
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Sprint and Nextel have tentatively agreed to basic terms of a merger. The $36 billion deal would create a third giant cellular carrier with nearly 39 million subscribers. Although Sprint shareholders will retain more than 50% of the combined company, to be called "Sprint-Nextel", the merger will otherwise be mutual. The new company will have a 50-50 split among board members from each company. The new company would spin off Sprint's local landline operations. Nothing has been finalized yet, but the companies are said to be "advanced negotiations", and an official announcement could come next week.
http://www.phonescoop.com/
Is this the same Nextel who once showed a fine grasp of taste by running an ad campaign called "The Final Solution" featuring a Hitler impersonator promising to "exterminate all dues"?
More on this here
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff that matters only to them
well, that depends.
When the Bell Atlantic/GTE/AirTouch/PrimeCo merger was announced, it made lots of sense.
For the most part, the technology was the same, and there was little coverage overlap. They basically took 4 companies -- a Northeast, South, West, and Southwest company, and made them one.
Cingular/ATT is all overlap, but at least similar technology.
Nextel/Sprint is even worse..... It's all overlap, and completely different technologies.
In this area consolidation is exepcted. How many carriers can the market space really support...I say 3 just because it's a magic number I think Nextel is currently the number 5 wireless carrier, not sure about sprint, but I think it's in the top 3 (Verizon is/was number 1 last time I checked).
The thing I love about Nextel are their phones. From a developers [J2ME] perspective, the are very easy to work with (except for webjal). Specifically, their iDen network and their programming APIs allow access to the GPS functionality of the phone. The i730 has a complete programmers' guide available for download from the Motorla site. Can't wait to get my hands on their latest camera phone to see if you can programatically control the camera. Then you could snap a pic and tag the info with the GPS coordinates.
Additionally, they [Nextel] have a nice developers site. Downside is that I find Nextel converage to be much worse than Verizon, so I ended up needing a Verizon phone for actual talking and a Nextel one for fun development.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I wonder what possible technology can be used for the 800Mhz spectrum to carry cellular/pcs/what-have-you traffic other than IDEN technology.
The 800Mhz frequencies Nextel uses are the leftovers from the SMR group with channel spacing of 25Khz and are shared with Public Safety and Heavy Industrial (like utilities). It's not a clean contiguous block of spectrum like the PCS carriers have.
This must be a consolidation of companies for other reasons...
All the worlds indeed a
AT&T did not merge with Cingular. AT&T Wireless, which had already been spun off from AT&T, merged with Cingular. AT&T is still around as a separate company.
If you can't beat them, embrace and extend them.
Nextel, on the other hand . . . Best I can tell, Nextel's service has it all over everybody, bar none. They offer network features no-one else can even come close to, and I don't just mean the walkie-talkie thing. Their services and features are actually interesting, useful, and well documented! Almost everyone I know who uses Nextel just loves them. The only shortcoming I've ever even heard of is modest geographical coverage, which, sadly, was the show-stopper for me. So now Nextel's merging with Sprint. What a disaster for Nextel. Both the differences in their technology and the fact this is a merger not a buyout will prevent Nextel from fixing Sprint, unlike Cingular with AT&T Wireless. (The latter really stank; trust me on this.) Sprint's grasping incompetence will suffuse Nextel like red dye bleeding through the laundry, and where we had a big clumsy company and a smaller, really good one, there'll just be one really big, rather poor one. What a shame.
So, Sprint/Qualcomm came up with a competing alternative to Direct Connect called ReadyLink, but it's not anywhere near as useful as Direct Connect because there aren't nearly as many other people who have it.
So in the short term, what Sprint is going to do is to make changes on the network side to allow Sprint phones to walkie-talkie with Nextel phones. That will effectively instantly make more valuable both Nextel's phones and Sprint's phone.
In the longer term, Nextel is going to have to move to new spectrum that the FCC has given them due to Nextel phones interfering with emergency vehicle communication. Because of this, they will have to move customers to new phones. So since they have to move their network and swap out their customers' phones anyway, there is no reason that they wouldn't just take the opportunity to move to the significantly more efficient, flexible, and forwards-compatible CDMA 1xRTT (and soon EV-DO high-speed data) standard (that Sprint just happens to run on.
Bingo. Now it begins to make sense, eh?
Man doesn't have cell phone, and insists on telling people.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This seems odd as Nextel just made a huge commitment to NASCAR. I think it was a 10 year contract to sponsor their top Cup division. In addition, they must have spent a ton this year alone branding their name on the NASCAR circuit. Why would Sprint want anything to do with that?
Trevor
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Actually, minutes for 2 way come from a pool shared by all phones on the plan, usually. People tend to use 2 way because their boss (who likely pays for their phone) doesn't see who's using 2 way on the bill, but if you call someone using the cell phone it shows up itemized on the bill and he'll say "who the hell were you talking to for 65 minutes during work that day?"
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
http://aolsvc.news.aol.com/business/article.adp?id =20041210203609990007
Sprint-Nextel deal talk sparks vendor concern
By Sinead Carew, Reuters
NEW YORK, Dec 10 (Reuters) - The prospect of a deal between Sprint and Nextel Communications sparked concerns on Friday about a shrinking U.S. market for mobile network equipment, sending shares of Nextel's key supplier Motorola Inc. down almost 8 percent.
Sprint Corp. is in advanced negotiations to buy Nextel Communications Inc. for more than $36 billion in a mostly stock deal that would combine the No. 3 and No. 5 U.S. mobile providers, according to sources familiar with the deal.
Motorola is the sole network supplier and the main handset supplier to Nextel, and analysts say it has the most to lose as the industry shrinks to four main service providers.
If Sprint and Nextel merge they are expected to operate Nextel's Motorola-based network for another several years but choose technology Sprint uses for future networks.
"Motorola would certainly get a piece of that business on the infrastructure and the handset side but one, it would be a more competitive market so the margins are lower, and two, they would be sharing it," said Deutsche Bank analyst Brian Modoff, who has a "hold" rating on Motorola shares.
Sprint runs a network on standard technology known as CDMA and has plans to start using a faster version next year. Nextel uses Motorola's proprietary iDen technology.
Motorola's President and Chief Operating Officer Mike Zafirovski told an investor conference in San Francisco on Friday that he was confident Nextel would continue to use the Motorola technology known as iDen for the next 2-3 years.
Analysts believe Sprint needs to keep Nextel's network running for several years because Nextel's walkie-talkie style Push-to-Talk feature has a strong following among Nextel's lucrative and loyal business customer base.
CHALLENGES AHEAD FOR MOTOROLA
Nextel has been testing a high-speed technology from a private company called Flarion Technologies. But a Sprint deal would likely mean it does not end up using this technology, at least in the near term, several analysts have said.
Sprint will most likely instead migrate Nextel's customers to CDMA, said Legg Mason analyst Christopher King who believes the pair can save about $2 billion in the next few years by building a CDMA based network for high-speed mobile services.
In the meantime Charter Equity Research analyst Ed Snyder said Motorola is likely to lose out on the equipment side but could win some new business at Sprint by building phones that will work on both the CDMA and iDen networks.
Motorola, the U.S. market leader among handset makers, has been struggling to win back Sprint as a handset customer after being displaced by rivals, including Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. , in recent years.
Sprint currently uses network gear from Lucent Technologies Inc. , Nortel Networks and to a lesser extent Motorola. A Nextel-Sprint deal could mean more business for Lucent and Nortel.
"In terms of impact on specific vendors. If they combined and went with CDMA that's an incremental positive for Nortel and Lucent and an incremental negative for Motorola," said Tim Daubenspeck of Pacific Crest Securities.
But the mobile network gear industry as a whole will find itself fighting harder for orders from a smaller group of bigger U.S. providers, he said. European countries already only have about three or four large mobile providers each.
Ericsson , the world's biggest mobile network gear maker, recently blamed U.S. consolidation for declining sales. One of its biggest customers, Cingular Wireless , bought another client, AT&T Wireless, in October, shrinking the U.S. market to five national providers.
Daubenspeck said consolidation among service providers could force a merger spree in the